A childhood close to books, and disability

Even before her diagnosis, Llewellyn had extensive experience of disability: she and her brother grew up in Adelaide acting as the "arms and legs" for their father, Richard, who was paralysed from the age of 20 due to polio.

Having wooed Llewellyn's mother from inside his iron lung, married and had two children, in the 1980s Richard became a disability advisor to South Australian Premier John Bannon.

"He was able to build a life at a time when really the attitude about people with disabilities was you stay home, you are not a valued member of society, you will have no worth," Llewellyn says.

From an early age, books were a big part of Llewellyn's life with her father. He would often read his daughter her favourite, Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, which centres around a swallow and a statue.

"I used to have to turn the pages for him and then he would read the story. I'm pretty sure … that he knew most of that book off by heart because we read it a lot of times," Llewellyn recalls.

"So this paralysed man, who was a statue in his own way, [was] reading to a child … and I don't know if he ever saw that in what we were doing, but certainly I can see that book in a whole new light [now]."

"A terrible secret I had to keep"

Llewellyn was introduced to the literary world by her mother, the poet Kate Llewellyn.

The young Caro regularly mixed with the writers who would come to the house, and went on to forge her own literary career: first in publishing, then as an author, and eventually managing literary festivals in Australia and abroad.

Finding new writers and familiarising herself with the work of her guests required her to read broadly, and often.